Hybrid passive and active approach to tracking movement within indoor environments

Location‐aware services enable location intelligence which provides many benefits such as personalisation of communications, consumer analytics, locating a fireman in a burning building or classifying daily activities in the home among numerous other services. Active localisation technology is where a person carries a device such as a phone or beacon which communicates with a nearby wireless access point, whereas passive localisation is where a person does not carry any electronic device but their presence in a room causes a nearby monitoring device to detect them. This is the holy grail of tracking people as they do not need to carry tracking devices. A hybrid tracking approach is where both active and passive tracking techniques can be used to complement each other in tracking individuals indoors. This study provides an overview of an indoor location framework which allows the plugging in of multiple active tracking solutions such as Bluetooth beacons in addition to facilitating passive localisation techniques to provide a flexible hybrid indoor tracking solution for pinpointing individuals in locations and accordingly classify their activities. The authors demonstrate the practicalities of such a technique when used to classify everyday activities of daily life within a typical home environment.